The Phoenix Land (55 page)
Authors: Miklos Banffy
This visit to Transylvania had a great effect on me. It was while I was there that the thought first entered my head that I might come back to my native land for good; and there, far from the world of politics, start to write.
All this was still just a dream, and I was still far from making any definite decision. There were also all sorts of difficulties. Still, this was when the idea was born. Of course, one’s decisions are rarely taken for only one reason. Where I am concerned, action is always the fruit of long and profound mental labour and follows much weighing up of the reasons for it, both strong and
weak. It gradually became clear to me that I really had almost nothing to do in Budapest. The Council of Fine Arts took up little of my time. I tried several other things, including trying once again to take up painting, but it gave me little satisfaction. I wrote a satirical comedy,
Maskara
, in which I chose the
emerging
Fascist organization as the object of my mockery. At the same time I still had hankerings for some diplomatic occupation and toyed with the idea of getting a post at some distant embassy. Bethlen hinted at the League of Nations, but this did not appeal to me after my previous experience in Geneva when the Hungarian Foreign Ministry had spent so much time in pulling me this way and that just as a puppeteer treats his marionettes. The Turkish Embassy was then vacant, and I would have gone there willingly. In 1916 and 1917 I had spent a lot of time in the capital, Istanbul, on a cultural and political mission. I got along well with the Turks and felt that my discussions with them had earned me their respect. I still feel I would probably then have done better there than anyone else; but Kánya soon put a stop to that; and it is certain that no ambassador can be properly
effective
without full support from home. Kánya’s ill will would have been an endless source of vexation, and so it was easy for me to draw back from pursuing that idea.
So it was that my dream of returning to Transylvania became gradually stronger and stronger until it finally became a fixed intention. Standing now on the sidelines of political events, I became aware of the insidious growth of a kind of spiritual lethargy in the Hungarian political scene; and this, although barely noticed by most people, played a big part in my ultimate decision. Superficially, there were few signs of this. The League of Nations’ loan had given a boost to the economy. Furthermore, the state loans had been followed by private investment. Dollars were pouring into the country, and quite a number of big
enterprises
that had access to this new source of funding got
themselves
seriously into debt. Although the time of the reform of our national institutions was now over, there were still some
important
areas where action was desperately needed: two especially.
The first was in the field of agriculture. The agrarian economy of Hungary was based on wheat production. This worked well
under the Habsburg monarchy, for the only great cereal-growing areas within the Empire’s borders were the
Alföld
– the Great Hungarian Plain – and the country west of the Danube; and their entire production was sold inside the hereditary lands, with markets in Vienna and even in the Carpathian provinces and Transylvania. The internal customs and excise policy set the prices at a level that made cereal growing profitable. With the new frontiers the situation was completely changed, for now the consumer provinces found themselves outside the country. Hungarian wheat was faced with competition from abroad, and international prices had dropped so low that there was no longer an economically viable market for Hungarian cereals. This was when the so-called ‘
boletta
’ system was introduced. This meant that the combined Hungarian Export Board purchased wheat from the farmers for more than it could be sold abroad. The
ultimate
deficit to the state was to be met by the treasury. It was intended to be a temporary measure, only to last for the time being. However, to bring it to an end it would have been
necessary
for the state to act swiftly to encourage better husbandry in some and a move to industry for others. In later years this was achieved in the countryside around Kecskemét. But at that time the ministry of agriculture was not up to the task, and everything stayed just as it was.
The second problem that remained to haunt us was that of land reform. The first plan put forward by the Bethlen
government
had been too modest, covering only some seventeen per cent of the land available, and failed because those who acquired the distributed lands did not have the cash to exploit them; production fell and, instead of promoting contentment, only discontent followed. Therefore, a year or so after my resignation a new and far more comprehensive plan was evolved which would have had spectacular results if it had not been allowed slowly to peter out. This plan had envisaged that the state would expropriate the land, divide it up and redistribute it, while the former owners would receive compensation in the form of state securities which, being based on the gold standard, would be negotiable abroad, which it was hoped would encourage
substantial
holders to reinvest in new or existing industries. It was
designed to attract the American market, then the world’s
richest
. I do not know who invented this plan, but Bethlen and Horthy were in favour of it. Unfortunately, Bethlen, already overstretched by his myriad responsibilities, could not tackle it alone and did not have one first-rate economist among his close advisers. Valko could have done it, but he soon became foreign minister and anyway was perhaps not aggressive enough for the task, since to fight the opposition of the great landowners needed a man of ferocious energy.
So this plan also failed; and after the World Crash in 1931 no one thought about the matter again
139
.
In my view it was the rural Hungarian gentry who were in some measure responsible for this failure to bring about an effective reform of the land. This class had become increasingly influential during the Horthy regime, for the aristocracy had
distanced
themselves further and further from the government. This, of course, had been largely due to their feelings about the restoration of the monarchy. Their place had been increasingly filled by the gentry, who thus gained much influence with Horthy and his entourage.
And it must be said that the gentry as a class were far more reactionary and opposed to any form of modernization than the aristocrats had ever been. One can say many things detrimental to the Hungarian aristocracy, but it was certain that they never lost their international outlook and so should have been easy to convert to the vital necessity for industrialization.
134
. And not only in his youth. His daughter still possesses a small
self-portrait
showing Bánffy in early middle age, which shows
considerable
mastery of his medium; as do the caricatures and the costume and set designs for the Budapest Opera now in the Ráday Institute. His coloured design for the decoration of the altar for King Karl’s coronation in 1916 is still displayed in the Treasury of the Matthias Church in Buda.
135
.
‘Panama’
in Hungarian means ‘swindle’. It is derived from the notorious corruption that brought about the liquidation of the first Panama Canal Company in 1889.
136
. Regulator or arbiter.
137
. Regent Horthy had his quarters in the Royal Palace in the old fortress of Buda.
138
. The great castle of Bonczhida, some twenty-nine kilometres north of Kolozsvár, was one of Transylvania’s grandest country houses. Destroyed after World War II and now utterly ruined, it lives on in Bánffy’s detailed descriptions of the castle of ‘Dénestornya’ in the first volume of his Transylvanian trilogy. After we had
completed
this translation of Bánffy’s memoirs, the Translyvanian Trust started a full-scale restoration; when completed the castle will be used as a centre for cultural studies, including modern methods of restoring old buildings. The work of the
Transylvanian
Trust has been considerably helped by the Prince of Wales, whose practical interest has been manifested by the provision of English architects and specialists. This would have given great pleasure to Miklós Bánffy himself, who would doubtless be
gratified
that an apartment is being prepared for the use of his family.
139
. That is, until the post-war Communist government expropriated all the agricultural holdings they could lay their hands on.
Ady
: Hungarian poet who had been closely associated with Mihály Károlyi at the time of the October Revolution.
The Duke of Alba
: Commander-in-chief of the armies of King Philip II of Spain and Regent of the Netherlands when largely Protestant Holland formed part of the Habsburg domains in the sixteenth century. Waged a bloody war in a vain attempt to eradicate Protestantism in the Netherlands.
Archduke Albrecht
(1897-1956): A fervent admirer of Germany and the Nazi Party.
Count Gyula Andrássy
(1860-1929): Member of the Hungarian
parliament
, a Legitimist leader and political opponent of István Bethlen and the Horthy administration. Mihály Károlyi’s father-in-law, he was also an art collector of some distinction.
Mihály Apaffy I
: Prince of Transylvania from 1665 until 1690.
Count Albert Apponyi
(1846–1933): From 1892, he led the Hungarian Party and was minister for religion and education from 1906 to 1910 and from 1917 to 1918. A leading advocate of free schooling, he attracted the animosity of several minority groups. He led the Hungarian delegation to the Paris peace talks and fought hard to achieve revision of the treaty terms. He was the leading speaker of the Legitimist Party in parliament in the post-war years.
Lord Asquith
(1852–1928): The Earl of Oxford and Asquith. Liberal politician, held several ministerial posts and was prime minister from 1908 to 1916.
Gül Baba
: Muslim holy man who is said to have been present when Budapest was taken by the Turks in 1541 and who afterwards planted a rose garden on the hill that bears his name to this day. His small octagonal mausoleum was used for a time as a Christian chapel but was restored to its original condition in 1961. It commands a fine view of the Danube.
Lord Arthur Balfour
(1848–1930): Statesman and politician, prime minister of Great Britain and several times British delegate at
international
conferences. Later created an earl. His languid manner
concealed
an exceptionally acute brain. Piers Brendon, in his
Eminent Edwardians,
wrote: ‘Balfour had the sang-froid of an iceberg.’
Zoltán Baranyai (1888–1948)
: Historian, diplomat and jurist. In 1920 the Hungarian government had created a non-official secretariat at the League of Nations in Geneva. It was headed first by Mihály Réz (1878–1921) then by Baranyai.
Jean Louis Barthou
(1852–1934): Headed the French delegation at the Genoa conference. He was prime minister of France in 1913 and minister of defence and justice between 1921 and 1922. In 1934, as foreign minister, he was active in building up France’s defences against the threat posed by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. In the autumn of that year he was assassinated in Marseille.
Lajos Batthyány
: Hungary’s first constitutional prime minister,
executed
by Franz Joseph in 1849.
Tivadar Batthyány
: Liberal politician, one of the founding members of the National Council, once a friend and collaborator of Károlyi’s but who afterwards was to back away from him.
Józef Bem
: Polish soldier of fortune who had become a general in the Transylvanian uprising against the Habsburgs. In December 1848 he reoccupied Kolozsvár, but in August 1849 he was forced to
surrender
and, with twelve other generals and several hundred others, was executed by order of Emperor Franz Joseph.
Eduard Benes
(1884–1948): Nationalist Czech politician. Under Habsburg rule, he agitated for the independence of Bohemia and was later rewarded by the Western powers with ministerial posts in the newly formed Czechoslovak Republic, of which he became prime minister in 1921 and president of the republic in 1935. A lifelong enemy of Hungary.
Philippe Berthelot
(1866–1934): French foreign office minister who played an influential part in the discussions on the border changes decided at the peace talks that followed the First World War.
Bessarabia
: Territory annexed by Russia in 1812, seized by Romania in 1918 and restored to Russia in 1947.
Count István Bethlen
: Member of an old aristocratic family that for centuries had furnished the once semi-independent province with its rulers and political leaders. He was born in 1874 and in 1945 was imprisoned by the new Communist regime. Bethlen was one of Transylvania’s most influential politicians. Like Bánffy, he had a dream of one day restoring some degree of autonomy to Transylvania but was finally frustrated by the inexorable terms of the peace treaties that followed the First World War. He died in 1947.
Vilmos Böhm
(1880–1949): Defence minister under Károlyi and
commander
-in-chief of the army under Béla Kun. He fled the country in 1919, returning only after the Second World War when he accepted diplomatic posts, including that of ambassador to Sweden. He then fell out with the post-war Communist government and never returned to Hungary.
General George Boulanger
(1837–1891): French minister of defence from 1886 to 1887 and headed a reactionary revolt against the French republic in 1889.
Ionel Bratianu
(1864–1927): Leader of the Romanian National
Liberal
Party – Partidul National Liberal – who was prime minister of Romania five times between 1909 and 1927, when he was succeeded by his brother. His party was supported largely by big business and concentrated on modernizing Romania’s backward economy. A leader of pro-Allied opinion in Romania, he was later largely
responsible
for his country entering the war in 1916 on the Allied side. Later he sent Romanian troops to help oust the Béla Kun regime and then to occupy a large slice of Hungarian territory.
Aristide Briand
(1862–1932): French foreign minister for many years and later prime minister. Queen Zita’s brothers deceived themselves if they fancied that Briand supported the return of the
King-Emperor
Karl either to Hungary or Austria. He seems to have politely pronounced himself sympathetic to the exiled Habsburgs but had never been so rash as to pledge French support for their restoration.
Lord Bryce
(1838–1922): Politician, historian, attorney at law and
professor
at Oxford, British ambassador in Washington from 1907 to 1914. Viscount Bryce spoke in the House of Lords about the unjust decisions of the treaty of Trianon.
Budweis
: Formerly in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in the Czech Republic more than two hundred kilometres north of Vienna.
Prince Castagnetto
(1879–1923): Member of the Neapolitan
Caracciolo
family, Italian ambassador in Budapest from 1920 to 1923.
Lord Robert Cecil
(1864–1958): Lawyer and conservative politician, son of Lord Salisbury, represented Britain at the Paris peace talks.
Gyorgyi Vasilievich Chicherin
(1872–1936): Senior soviet minister from 1918 to 1930, was signatory to the Brest-Litovsk treaty.
George Benjamin Clemenceau
(1841–1936): Radical French
politician
. He was prime minister from 1906 to 1909, during which time he was responsible for the separation of church and state. He was again prime minister in 1917 and presided over the peace talks, where he proved to be one of the most implacable enemies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. This earned him the nickname of ‘the Tiger’.
Count Czernin
: Austrian foreign minister in 1914 and responsible for persuading the aged emperor into signing the fatal ultimatum which was then delivered to Serbia and resulted in the declaration of war. He had done this by informing Franz Joseph that the Serbian army had already crossed the Drava and so was invading Hungarian
territory
. This was not in fact true. He was a supporter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Austria-Hungary since the suicide of his cousin the archduke Rudolf, and who had collected around him in
the Belvedere palace in Vienna what many people considered a
sinister
cabal whose ultimate aim was to incorporate all the Balkan states under the aegis of the Habsburg monarchy. The plots woven in the Belvedere palace form the subject of a seminal subplot in Bánffy’s
The Writing on the Wall.
Géza Daruváry
(1866–1934): Bánffy’s successor as foreign minister from 1922 to 1924.
Friedrich Ebert
(1871–1925): German politician, leader of the Social-Democrat Party between 1913 and 1919 and president of the
so-called
‘Weimar Republic’ between 1919 and 1925.
Tibor Eckhardt
(1888–1972), Press spokesman for the provisional government in Szeged in 1919, head of the press department under Teleki’s government between 1920 and 1921, president of the Independent Smallholders Party in 1932.
János Erdélyi
(1863–1930): As his name suggests, a native of Transylvania, he was principal envoy of the Romanian government at the Budapest discussions concerning the transfer of Transylvania to Romanian sovereignty.
Empress Elisabeth, Queen of Hungary
: Wife of Emperor Franz Joseph. Spent much time in Hungary, loved the Hungarians and spoke their language, and was much beloved by them.
Count Tamás Erdödy
(1868–1931): His memoirs,
Die Memoiren des Grafen Tamás von Erdödy Habsburgs Weg von Wilhelm zu Briand Vom Kurier der Sixtus-Briefe zum Königsputschisten von Paul Szemere und Erich Czech
were published in 1931.
Mihály Esterházy
(1884–1958): Member of parliament from 1910 and Mihály Károlyi’s envoy to Switzerland between 1918 and 1919,
distant
cousin to Bánffy and a close friend.
Móric Esterházy
: Cousin and close friend of Miklós Bánffy.
King Ferdinand of Bulgaria
: Known to the world as ‘Foxy’ Ferdinand, scion of the family of Sax-Coburg Goth, king of Bulgaria from 1908 to 1918, died 1948.
Luigi Facta
(1861–1930): Head of the Italian government from February to October 1922.
Fiume
: A port on the Adriatic, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was renamed Rijeka when ceded to Yugoslavia by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 and is now in the independent republic of Slovenia.
Maurice Foucher
: Became high commissioner in Budapest in 1920. He was recalled to Paris after King Karl’s second
putsch
.
General Franchet d’Esperey
: French officer, commander-in-chief of the Allied forces based in Belgrade when the war came to an end.
István Friedrich
(1883–1951): Hungarian politician. In 1919 he assisted in the plot to oust the Peidl government and then tried to form a government of his own which was not recognized either by
Admiral Horthy or by the Western powers. He joined the exiled king in his attempts to return and then became one of the founders of the Legitimist Party.
Gerbeaud
: Founder of the most famous café, pastry and confectionary shop in Budapest which bears his name and whose doors are still open today. The chocolates are as good as ever. There is a moving scene in
They Were Divided
, the last book of Bánffy’s trilogy, which is set in Gerbeaud’s in 1914.
Gödöllo
: Former Habsburg summer residence not far from Budapest.
Gyula Gömbös
(1886–1936): Pro-fascist president of the Hungarian Defence Union in 1919, defence minister from 1929 to1936.
General Görgey
: One of the 1848 rebels. Hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded, surrendered to the Tsarist army at Világos as he knew his men would be more humanely treated by the Russians than they would have been by the Austrians. With hindsight there is no
question
that this was the only sensible course and saved many lives, but he was nevertheless considered to be a traitor by many Hungarians.
Count János Hadik
: Briefly prime minister in the troubled days at the end of October 1918. He does not seem to have inspired much
confidence
either in the young king or, for that matter, in Mihály Károlyi who was to succeed him in office.
Albert Hanotaux
(1853–1944): French politician and historian, twice minister for foreign affairs. He was in office when Madagascar became part of the French empire and played an important part in the formation of French West Africa. He frequently represented France at the League of Nations.
Lajos Hatvany
(1880–1961): Rich Hungarian banker and newspaper owner, author of several works who also edited a five-volume
collection
of papers concerning the great poet Petöfi. Was a member of the National Council in 1918. Left Hungary on the fall of Communism. Although politically active at the time of Károlyi’s socialist republic, he receives only two brief and unflattering mentions in the Károlyi memoirs. He was much disliked by Bánffy.
Baron Julius von Haynau
: Austrian military commander principally responsible for savage reprisals against those who had taken part in the 1848 revolution. It was his order to execute thirteen generals that earned Emperor Franz Joseph the nickname, so full of hatred: ‘The Old Hangman in Vienna’.
Iván Héjjas
(1890–1950): a well-known figure of the White Terror. It seems he must also have understood some German, as he served in the nineteenth Imperial Regiment.
Ferenc Herczeg
(1863–1954): Much respected Hungarian writer and friend of Bánffy’s.
Géza Herczeg
(1888–1954): Edited the
Nap, Magyar Hírlap
and
Az Ujság
. In 1918 he was head of the press department under Mihály
Károly. Later he worked in Vienna for the Neue Freie Presse. After a time he went to live in America.
The Abbé János Hock
: With Károlyi and others, was a founder member of the National Council, much disliked and distrusted as a self-seeking demagogue by Miklós Bánffy but much admired by Mihály Károlyi, who described him as ‘a brilliant orator’. On 16 October he became president of the National Council, a post which Károlyi resigned, having been appointed Minister-President. Like Károlyi he was later to find himself an exile from Hungary.